payback's a bitch

payback | American Dictionary

payback
noun
us/ˈpeɪˌbæk/

paybacknoun (PUNISHMENT)

[ C/U ]
an action that punishes someone for something bad that the person did to you; revenge:
[ U ]They view the proposed initiative as payback to those senators who have not shown enough Republican loyalty.

paybacknoun (MONEY RETURN)

[ Cusually sing ]
the activity of giving money that is owed, or of getting back something for money spent:
He'll have a 20-year payback on his investment, and the improvements should last another 20 years after that.

payback | Business English

payback
noun[ C or U ]
/ˈpeɪbæk/ukus
FINANCE
the profit received from an investment or the time that it takes to receive the same amount that was invested:
Shareholders are awaiting a cash payback from the deal.
a payback on sthYou should have a 20-year payback on your investment in solar panels.
an advantage that you get from something:
payback for sthThe payback for reorganization should be increased productivity.
 payback time
a situation in which someone will have to suffer for the way that they have behaved in the past:
The union has been treated very badly, and now it's payback time, and strike action will go ahead.

Examples of payback

payback
Individual retirement income by statutory pension paybacks will not be sufficient to maintain their standards of living.
Instantiation of a model as a robot can be a valuable aid in evaluating the costs versus paybacks of adding complications to that model.
There have been charges that state officials often asked for and received paybacks from privatisation deals.
We were able to identify a considerable range of research paybacks.
Payback remained very much of a hypothetical order.
The main constraint is economic; with a payback of 15-19 years, a mangosteen orchard is not an attractive investment.
One constituent of this is the pursuit of" symbolic" goals with a high political" payback", even to the detriment of more" commercial" business objectives.
The payback to the military was even greater.
The simplest of these, the payback method, can be used to estimate the location most likely to return the original investment quickest.
In order to design the most cost-effective waste heat recovery system, payback time has to be minimized.
Obviously, the first two choices are impossible, since the payback time can not be negative, and lifetime of the system is 10 years only.
The capital costs have a negative impact on the payback time, hence only the lower power fans are economically viable.
The payback period is 2 years and 7 months.
Since this includes an array of homes in different regions and with different baseline insulation levels, the payback period clearly varies substantially across homes.
Crops were also sometimes used for borrowing and payback at the same rate of interest as credit in cash.
See all examples of payback
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.